So fasting is merely any time that you don't eat. So the standard fast which
everybody should be doing should be 12 hours, which is sort of like you finished
dinner at 7:00 at night and you eat breakfast at 7 a.m. That's a 12-hour
fast. That's where the word 'breakfast' comes from. It's a meal that breaks your
fast. You can't break your fast if you're never fast.
So therefore, the implication is that this is actually a part of everyday life.
So you have to understand the body only exists in two sort of conditions. It's
either in the fed state or the fasted day. So you're either eating, which is
storing food energy, or you're fasting, which is you're burning food energy. It's
one or the other, and you don't do both at the same time. You don't eat and burn
fat at the same time because when you eat, your body receives the instructions
to store body fat, because food energy's going in. So if you understand that then
you understand that, well, if you simply extend those fasting periods, then you
allow your body to spend a little bit more time burning off that food energy.
Which is the sugar, which is making you sick and giving you diabetes, type 2
diabetes, or the fat that's sort of clogging up all your organs, you get fatty
liver and fatty pancreas and all that sort of thing. So fasting is anytime you
don't eat. You can simply take that sort of normal 12 hour fast and extend it to,
say, 16 hours for example. So you eat everything within an eight hour window,
and that's called a 16-8, it's very popular and that's done most days of the
week. Another sort of popular sort of thing is to go to almost a 23 or 24 hour
fast, which is a sort of one meal a day sort of idea. So if you go from lunch to
lunch or dinner to dinner, that's about 23 hours 24 hours in
between the meals. The point is that use you're only storing food energy for one
hour of the day and the other 23 hours you're gonna allow your body to
essentially digest or burn off that sugar.
And that's also a very powerful way to get your blood sugars down in lose
weight. Then you can go longer and longer, so those are sort of the most popular
sort of regimens and certainly for older people we had encourage people to use
sort of a shorter fast. So the difference between fasting that was done sort of in
the 70s, which actually had a few problems, was that they were doing these
super long fasts, like 30, 60 days at a time, as opposed to say 24 hours which is
really just sort of dinner to dinner. You're still eating once a day. But you
certainly can go longer if you want, but as you go longer, there's more power but
then there's also more risk. So you have to be more careful for example, if
you're on medications, if you're older, if you have any concerns about malnutrition
or underweight, then you have to be a little bit more careful. But those are
always options - you can go three days, five days without food, it's okay. The
actually the average weight loss, actual fat loss is actually, only half
a pound of fat per day of fasting. So you have to decide what you're gonna do and
why and that's where having some guidance might be very helpful, so the
our program for example offers some guidance, but most people would do very
well to start with some of the shorter fasts and then sort of dabble in with
some of the long the fasts. And that's sort of the most important rule, the two
most important rules of fasting, really. One is always be safe. So you'd want to
make sure you speak to your doctor, you you know what you're doing, and if at any
time you don't feel well, you stop. So always be safe, that's number one. And the
the other one that's really important is to fit it into your life, because if you
start doing a fasting schedule, that really doesn't go along with your
lifestyle, that's not gonna last. So I had one fellow one time, he would you used to
go out with his friends and have lunch, and he'd stop doing that to do the fast.
I'm like, "No, no, no, no. That's not the way it works." You do what
you normally do and you fit all the stuff, all the fasting around that,
because otherwise if you cut yourself off from all your friends, you're
not gonna like it and you're gonna stop doing it. So it's not viable in the long term.